First Down: Keith Miller
by Olivia Giovetti
For bass-baritone Keith Miller, making an entrance at the Met is practically on par with making his bed or making coffee. This season, he sings in five productions—a mix of standard warhorses and new productions—for a total of nearly 70 performances. The entrance to his 15-minute scene as Astarotte in Mary Zimmerman’s latest staging of Armida, however, may be his grandest yet—and his most demanding. Miller is flown in from the wings, performs jumps that would give an acrobat pause, and stands on the backs of fellow cast members. He does all of this while simultaneously inhabiting the prince of Hell’s character. And he sings. In the midst of this at a recent rehearsal, he was given a note to double a “t.” Recounting this story, he laughs at the absurdity of the minutiae. “I got your double ‘t’ right here,” he says with a laugh that is a touch devilish and character appropriate.
The 36-year-old singer has been making waves lately, not just for his commanding cannonball of a voice, but also for his explosive career trajectory. Growing up on a farm in Ovid, Colorado (population 330, according to the 2000 census), Miller spent his childhood engrossed in sports and oblivious to opera. “I played every sport—basketball, football, wrestling, track, baseball . . . [it was] my only way outta there,” Miller explains over a post-rehearsal dinner close to Lincoln Center.
He spent junior high playing eight-man football for a team that held the record losing streak in Colorado. High school signaled a switch to six-man football, with Miller the only freshman starter. Before his first game, in a foreshadowing of what opening night jitters would feel like a decade later, he threw up on the field. “I was so nervous. It was crazy, ridiculous,” he recounts. Nerves subsided and Miller helped to earn his team three state championships, with a 42-2 record. The losing streak was broken and Miller went to the University of Colorado as a starting fullback on its team, playing in both the Fiesta Bowl and Cotton Bowl, and carrying the Olympic Torch for the 1996 Atlanta games.
Two years prior to that, however, Miller took a girlfriend to see The Phantom of the Opera. What started as a rite of courtship turned into a full-blown love affair with the combination of music and theater. “I actually called a friend of mine, and she came over that night with the CD and I started listening. I went out the next morning, 10 a.m., literally waiting for the store to open [and] bought the CD.”
At this stage in the game, Miller was unaware of voice types or the Fach system and, while he sang along with the discs, figured that he couldn’t sing as the roles of Erik the Phantom or Raoul—both sat too high for his voice. Nevertheless, the college athlete ran through the canon, each disc a new sonic yard line. And then he ran out of musicals. “I rented the Three Tenors, and I saw Pav singing ‘Nessun dorma,’ the one from L.A.,” Miller says. “When his eyes did that thing at the end, I said, ‘Whatever the hell that was, that’s Phantom times a thousand.’
“And then, as a guy, I thought, ‘Well, it’d be cool—you speak Italian, you pick up chicks,’ you know? So I started listening to opera. And I went to the music library at CU, and I had my letter jacket on and everything and the [librarian] was like ‘Dude, what are you doing here?’”
Nevertheless, the librarian gave Miller a recording of Jussi Björling’s La bohème, which Miller described as “OK.” A video of Don Giovanni from Salzburg (“1976 or something”) was slightly more esoteric, but nonetheless riveting. “I was glued. Three hours went by like this,” he says, snapping his fingers. “And that’s when I discovered basses. I went out and bought a Sam Ramey CD and started singing along with the stuff because it was easier—making up words, copying. I had a pretty good ear for mimicry.”
While it made for a soothing pre-game ritual (other teammates listened to heavy metal and rock, and Miller focused with “Der Hölle Rache” from Die Zauberflöte), opera was still just a hobby for the footballer, who played in Finland and the Arena Football League at a time when there were rumors of a spring football league. “I was lucky every year. I had a great job in spring and then arena ball, and then I did workouts with the Raiders and the Broncos. About the time things were gonna open up with the Broncos—I had a great workout with them, and they lost their fullback—they switched their offense. No job opportunity anymore. The writing was on the wall with that.”
Taking the words of legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi to heart (“It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up”), Miller quickly auditioned for Pine Mountain Music Festival’s Young Artist Program. While he was still unable to read music, he could sing “Ho capito,” and his audition earned him four job offers. The eight-week-long program was a corresponding baptism by fire, with scenes including the finale from Così fan tutte, the trio from Les contes d’Hoffmann, and the Sparafucile-Rigoletto duet. He spent the first four weeks in intense coaching to catch up to his peers and, in more desperate times, he turned to the church where they rehearsed.
“They had a piano. I asked the guy, ‘Listen, I need to stay down here. Just lock the door; I’ll close it up.’ So I stayed down there from 10 o’clock to one in the morning every night. I knew where F was because of the dots, and then I found F on the piano, and I would listen to a recording to see flats, sharps—so I kind of taught myself how to read music. And that was that.” Miller now studies with full orchestral scores every chance he gets, absorbing as much as he can from even minute details like bowings.
Another Lombardi maxim comes to mind as Miller explains his life and career: “Leaders aren’t born; they are made. And they are made just like anything else—through hard work.” During a week-long, pavement-pounding visit to New York, in which Miller even asked for face time with then-New York City Opera General Manager and Artistic Director Paul Kellogg (“Just an off-the-boat idiot calling everybody up,” he says in bemused retrospect.), he got a break when notable manager Neil Funkhouser asked him to come by and sing. Funkhouser then brought Miller to teacher Bill Schumann, who told Miller he needed to train at the Academy of Vocal Arts.
“I’d never had student loans in my life, [and] I’d taken out something like $70,000 in loans to go to AVA. But I knew you don’t ever get a chance to go backwards and learn, so I turned down some jobs and stayed.” The gamble paid off. Shortly after graduation in 2006, Miller auditioned for the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. He was rejected, but was instead offered a full season with the company starting with a new production of Madama Butterfly as the Bonze. It was Peter Gelb’s first season as general manager, and the production was a groundbreaking staging courtesy of the late Anthony Minghella.
“My first rehearsal for the Met, I walk in [and] they’re doing the filming of the making of Madama Butterfly. So I’m singing and there are three TV cameras filming me. Minghella’s there. The most nerve-wracking thing ever, ever in my life. [James] Levine and Peter Gelb—come on.” Well over 100 performances later, Miller continues next season at the Met and takes on the parts of Ashby in La fanciulla del West and Monterone in Rigoletto. He also reprises his role as Zuniga in Carmen.
For a jock who spoke no foreign languages and couldn’t read a score a decade earlier, singing at the mecca of opera companies in a first season that included the Grammy-nominated recording of Eugene Onegin is a switch, to say the least. The change was aided in no small part by the audacity that comes with the competitive sports territory. Interestingly enough, Miller is not the first football player to turn to opera. There are the likes of tenor Noah Van Niel, who went from bruising at Harvard to studying at the Academy of Vocal Arts, as well as former Lindemann Young Artist (and team captain) Morris Robinson and Houston Oiler-turned-New York baritone Lawrence Harris, for example. However, as Miller’s coach Laurent Philippe points out, “What makes him different from other singers is that he’s always willing to go the extra mile. And once that’s done, he’s willing to go another. It’s indicative of the artist he wants to become.”
Perhaps the most tempting question to ask Miller is whether or not he finds any similarity between the coach-player dynamic of football and the coach-singer dynamic of music. “I learned to take responsibility,” he says of the latter relationship. “With football, you’re programmed to be a robot, because you’re taught to just react. It’s not until you start playing professionally that you have the acumen to be able to learn how to create a reaction in someone else. You just don’t know enough about life, about your sport. You don’t study enough film because you have classes. When you’re playing [professionally], you can study film 17 hours a day.
“With music, you first are just taught things. But eventually, when the term starts, you start to stop the coach and say, ‘No, we gotta go back and do this. I didn’t do this right.’ You start using them. You don’t really use your coaches in the NFL, you don’t use your coaches in college. . . . They tell you what to do, you do it, and you figure it out. And the career is so short, they don’t really care. The average career is one year—that’s nothing. And that was before, back when there were other leagues. Now it’s ridiculously short. The odds of making it in a league are something like one in 400,000. It’s just ridiculous.”
It’s rare that music can seem, in comparison, like a lucrative career option. Miller attributes his success as an artist, however, to his relationship with his music coaches.
“The greatest thing I ever did [was I] . . . walked upstairs to the music director of AVA, Christofer Macatsoris, and I knocked on his door and said, ‘Maestro, what’s the purpose of this place? Why is this place so special?’” A bold move, to say the least! “‘He was like, ‘I’ve never been asked that before.’ He thought about it for a little and goes, ‘The thing about AVA is we will teach you to learn how to learn, so that you will end up learning how to do things in four years that will take someone else 10 years to do. It’s not a shortcut. In fact, it’s going to take longer at the very beginning. But if you put that work in the front end, you come to results much faster. So we’re here to teach you to learn how to learn.’” A normally fast-paced talker, Miller relays this slowly and thoughtfully, allowing the words to sink in for their full effect.
“They will coach you under certain situations that will save your life,” he adds, citing a production he did of Don Giovanni. Cast as Leporello, he was also asked to sing Masetto in the final production week. Not only a serious vocal demand, it was also a physical task since both characters are beaten up onstage. Unsurprisingly, Miller lost his voice by opening night.
“I was begging the maestro, ‘Can you please move the Catalogue Aria? You’re killing me.’” Instead of moving it, the conductor took it at half-tempo. “I didn’t know this ’til later that year, but the coaches came up to him and said, ‘You’re killing him, why aren’t you helping him out? He’s dead.’
“And he goes, ‘No, he’s gonna know what it’s like to be exhausted, physically tired on opening night when he knows he’s getting reviewed on a major role. He’s gonna have to stand up onstage and figure out how in the hell to do it, and I want him to do it here before he ever has to do it in a company.’
“And at that moment, I was like, ‘You know what? This is the greatest place in the entire world.’”
Such training has already proven itself handy at the Met. It also goes hand in hand with an aphorism Miller recalls from a football coach: “The difference between a professional and an amateur is an amateur will practice until they get it right. A professional will practice until they don’t get it wrong.”
In addition to perennially learning and honing his own craft, Miller is also leveraging his unique background and perspective to help his colleagues. His company, Puissance Training, was formed, in part, from personal experience. Though famous now for his sculpted physique (the underground blog Barihunks dubbed his “the hottest chest in opera”), Miller was once a typical football player, as he proves with his license photo.
“I was 260 pounds, and they were telling me, ‘You can’t exercise anymore, you’ve gotta stop lifting weights because you’ll get tight,’” he explains of his training. “And the more they started telling me this, the more it sounded like the 1970s when they told athletes, ‘If you lift weights, you’re going to get muscle-bound, you’re gonna lose your speed and flexibility.’ . . . I knew I had to drop some weight, but I also knew football has specific training and basketball has specific training. All I remember singers talking about was yoga and Pilates. But that’s not specific training. So there’s gotta be something there.”
Miller and his team at Puissance are working on cultivating that specific training, paying particular note to the specific concerns of the twenty-first-century singer. “Cancellations are on the rise, leading to last-minute replacements—and although the opportunity for young new talent to be discovered is promising, those same singers lack the physical ability to keep up with the fast-paced world in which they have been thrust,” reads the website’s concept section.
“To illustrate,” it continues, “a young singer steps in for an ailing star and an instant buzz, drummed up by the singer’s management who claims that they are the next great wonder, begins. The singer is then offered numerous engagements and, as the whirlwind of this instant career starts to set in, it becomes clear that the singer has not prepared his body to physically handle the demands of the career. The singer then has to cancel the engagement, thereby creating an opportunity for the next new young ‘star’ to be born. Indeed, it is a vicious cycle.”
Combating the cycle, Miller has worked on programs for clients needing everything from altitude acclimation to time zone adjustments to childbirth. “We have a huge database of programs already in place to train athletes. . . . The biggest thing a teacher, a coach can [do] . . . is make the person independent of them. It’s like a car. You give them a car, they come back for the oil change every once in a while. You don’t want to be sitting there going, ‘Hands at 10 and two.’”
Managing his vocal and physical output has helped Miller through roles like that of Astarotte (one of his training tactics was alternating a line of recitative with sprinting on the Met’s C-level). “It’s all about having control over your stuff, because your career is planned, and that includes rest and everything else.”
His knowledge, commitment, and personality make him an ideal coach to keep singers in shape for opera itself. “I don’t want to mess with anything else,” he says. “You can’t say, ‘I want to look like this.’ No. I’m going to help you sing better. And it’s going to take you five years to do so. And I hate to say it, but there’s no quick fix. You have to earn it, just like you earned your technique. But those who stay [with the program] will be independent of the body that they used to have. They will be in control; they will have confidence.
“It’s easy to just do your job,” Miller continues. “It’s hard to go above and beyond. . . . You don’t want to be a Verizon commercial and look back and see 20 million people in your network. You want to be one of those AT&T commercials where there’s one person.”
Other companies have taken notice—from opera houses that have asked Miller to train their entire season of singers to corporations like Nike, which the singer has spoken with about the possibility of sponsoring a gym for the Met and the other major houses at Lincoln Center. Peter Gelb has taken note of his busy employee as well.
And while in many ways still a young artist himself, Miller is already working with the next generation, most notably as the artistic manager of Crested Butte Music Festival’s opera and YAP.
“I have a Young Artist who’s coming to my festival this summer. She sang a decent audition, [but] I looked at her résumé and she had a four-year gap. I said, ‘Excuse me—what’s this four-year gap for?’ And she said, ‘Well, I’ve lost 200 pounds. And it took me four years to do it, and I’m not done yet.’ I offered her a spot right there. Anybody who can do that over four years and knows that in the long term it’s gonna pay off, it will pay off. And I’m not just going to say that, I’ll back it up. . . . It goes above and beyond. . . . You can’t hide hard work.”
He cracks another grin. “I hate lazy people. I don’t know if you know that yet.” Then he pauses, reflects, and adds, “I don’t hate them. I just have no tolerance.”
Olivia Giovetti is a contributing editor for Time Out New York’s Opera and Classical section. In addition to “The $50 Week” and several features for Classical Singer, she has also written for the Washington Post, Playbill, and Gramophone. She’s online at fiftydollarweek.wordpress.com and oliviagiovetti.wordpress.com.
